Toothless and nearly blind, grandmother Pham Thi Ca refuses to leave her plot of land even after bulldozers demolished her house — an extraordinary holdout against Communist Vietnam's deepening addiction to coal.

Plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds are to be banned in England from April next year in a move campaigners have welcomed but warned will “only scratch the surface” in tackling the damage that non-degradable waste is doing to the environment.

Native Americans' use of fire to manage vegetation in what is now the Eastern US was more profound than previously believed, according to a Penn State researcher who determined that forest composition change in the region was caused more by land use than climate change.

Mining experts on Tuesday reentered a coal mine shuttered for more than eight years after one of New Zealand’s worst industrial disasters killed 29 men, the government said, looking to investigate the cause and retrieve the remains of victims.